Android Auto is a nifty aspect of owning a car with a big screen that directly communicates with your smartphone. Its main purpose is tomitigate the biggest distractions that may take some of your attention off of the roadand towards your phone. It does this by taking essential apps, like Google Maps, and turning up font sizes, contrast, and more to make all that necessary information easy to quickly digest. Google Maps is obviously the darling child of the entire Android Auto ecosystem as that’s the app most people will spend their time in when driving from place to place, and it recently came with amajor facelift. Google just enhanced how easy it can be to save your parking spot with Maps by including a new feature in the latest version of Google Maps for Android Auto.
Similar to dropping a pin but more streamlined to tell when you’ve left your car and started walking elsewhere,Google Assistant integrated automatic parking spot saving in 2019. For a while now, you’ve been able tomanually save your parking location in Google Maps from your smartphone, which is fairly easy to set up. It’s taken a while for Android Auto to get the tool, but as spotted by9to5Google, you can now switch on a toggle to save your parking location when you arrive at a destination on your car’s built-in display.
According to 9to5Google, Maps will offer to remember where you’ve actually parked after reaching your destination instead of taking the point you were driving to and calling that your parking spot. One of our tipsters has discovered that the parking-save feature is active for them, but hasn’t gotten the new UI we talked about just over a month ago. Itjust started rolling out a week-and-a-half ago, so while not everyone has gotten it yet, we assume everyone will be using this new-look Google Maps very soon. We’re glad the feature is finally coming in a small way to our cars, as it takes the need to dangerously and irresponsibly fumble around on our phones away from us when parking.
Android Auto, like its OS counterpart in Apple CarPlay, has become an integral part of modern life in our cars. You don’t even have to plug your Android smartphone into your car’s interface anymore in some newer car models, as it canconnect via bluetooth or a WiFi connection. If it doesn’t come with the wireless connect feature, there are some dongles you can buy to transform your car’s existing setup into one that’s free from cables. When you’re parked, it’s okay to lust for distraction from the road because, well, there’s nothing you need to focus on in front of you. In that case,Android is beginning to add tons of apps to Autothat otherwise aren’t available when driving. Lastly, while there’s a lot of good with the Android Auto UI,we can’t help but hate some quirks of the system as a whole.
